The Darkest Tale
by coleholic
Summary: His death devastated her but what happens when love isn't enough to save him? As Phoebe succumbs to her emotions to lie next to Cole in their grave... her grasp to cole will slip...
1. Part One: The beginning of the end

Phoebe  
  
It seems aeons ago when it happened, yet I remember every single minute insignificant detail. the look in his eyes, every flinch and cringe groaning in both of us. The tale of how we met is long forgotten, a vivacious narrative, once sparkling full of hope, dancing airily to a long deserted passion. And so, the vindictive clockworks of fate delivered us to our inevitable ending. The carving of our history discarded aimlessly on a trampled sidewalk. I tell you now of our darkest tale and I invite you to be a participant on our journey of unending sorrow as I narrate an unspoken, forgotten parable.  
  
Part One: The Beginning of our End.  
  
When I murdered him, I had anticipated the forthcoming pain, sorrow and grief but little did I know of what extent it would be.  
  
My throat chokes out the words and like poison they slaughter my Cole, my insides are begging me, they scream out at me to stop but my mouth rebels and instead the empty words betray me as they escape the dry flaking confines of my throat. No matter how hard I struggle or try, those same heartless words trickle out like crimson red blood, trying to spurt out from the deepest wounds of my heart.  
  
My heart is bleeding, I can feel the blood oozing out from the insides of my chest, those words pry my heart open like a long forgotten treasure box, the rusty hinges moans a creak of stubbornness but those words win.  
  
They win, overcoming every single obstacle which I try to set before it, but the words are strong and with bitter might they harshly force open the set jaws of my mouth and in an empty second, just one single, meaningless second, the words flow as freely as a river gushing down a valley. A dark sinister valley, and out into the icy glaciers of air.  
  
Cole's eyes, with a thin film of watery reflection gazes into mine, at that moment, certainties disappear into the crisp night air. His tears overflowing with pain, sting me like a sharp needle. The thin insignificant bleak metal point pierces into me and suddenly; my legs are like two toothpicks beneath me. I am suddenly balancing on two untrustworthy sticks, fragile and delicate. Almost like an innocent undeveloped child, I sway as if learning to walk for the first time; only I'm a girl, at an age of self- discovery and at an age where I should be embracing my future, shaping my own fantasies.  
  
Instead, the bitter night air nips at my skin, like hungry birds they snap their angry beaks at my soul and piece-by-piece, they carry each piece as they spread their bony wings and fly off into the black night with every fragment of happiness left inside of me. I feel the two fragile toothpicks beneath me crumble, finally surrendering to the force of gravity.  
  
As I sink slowly onto the ground, my limp and lifeless body puddling onto the stiff frosty ground, my nostrils fill with the intoxicating stench of scorching ground. The smell triggers flashes of spinning images into my mind, one by one, like a camera they snap into my mind with sudden blinding lights, they seem to taunt me, each only a memory but unleashing a gigantic ball of emotions inside of me.  
  
It rolls around, bouncing off the walls of my body, pounding every bone, every muscle to get out, to escape. As freely as the wind blows, it finally unshackles itself from the restraints of my body. I finally explode all of my emotions from a long awaited bomb that had been ticking away inside of me. With every echoing tick, shadows begin to haunt me; they sweep over me waves of endless darkness.  
  
All that is left is a void. my eyes succumb to the seduction of peace and I close my eyes before I hear him scream, before I hear the axe brought down on the execution of my love  
  
...... Before his crimson blood showers all over my guilty hands.  
  
  
  
The rusted yellow stained pages stare blankly up, taunting me. They hold my only key to the doorway, my last shreds of hope are embedded in those pages, and like a treasure hunter, and my hands rummage violently for the precious luminous jewels. Sweat saturates my shaking hands; the pages flip, its sound echoing menacingly in my ear. It whispers to me, like it KNOWS. it knows how to deliver him back into my sugary embrace, but it refuses to speak any louder.  
  
No matter how much I endeavour to will him back, everyday, his face is engraved into my mind, carved deeper than any scar but the sounds ripple over my ears. No matter how my body strives, no matter how much I have to bleed, the key expresses its stubbornness and refuses to venture its way into the dark rusting recesses of my mind.  
  
I sense it all, the aches, the waves of pain bathing over me, how my body yearns for his hand to caress my tear-stained face and how I yearn for him to lift the hard mask, moulded and thriving from the abundance of heart- breaking grief. The mask is almost permanent now, adhering to a face, a body escaped from the shackles of a sickened mind, no longer confined to toiled control.  
  
Unless. unless I find a way. Unless, like a desperate detective, I hunt, I hunt until all the pieces of the agonizing puzzle slide in flawlessly into each other and I will undertake a pursuit for the truth and the quest to bring him back, and to save him from my own murder. even if it kills me. 


	2. Part One: The Hollow

Cole  
  
Has she told you of my enforced death? Yet recounting the pain of it all is another matter not to be spoken casually of. When retelling of what we went through, caution must be our first priority for when we let our guard down our emotions will surge forward and tears will fall deep into a bottomless void. The excruciating torture of the past is a completely incomparable tale.  
  
Part One: The hollow  
  
How did you not see? The answer lay as clear as the glowing reflections of a babbling brook. Didn't you see I was struggling and battling an endless war inside of me? But you sat there; you did nothing even when I reached out with my last breath.  
  
I had lost control over my own diminishing body; the source was roaming inside my mind, a forthcoming King only too eager to claim his long awaited kingdom. And he ruled that Kingdom, his pride and power ruling over my every vein. Every muscle, he controlled and tore the thin and fraying last thread intertwining my mind with my body. He broke that thread with one effortless sweep of his icy hands and I lost control.  
  
He played the game all too well, his tactics cunning. His sly mind played tricks on you and like a magician he transformed meaningless words into an infatuating sanctuary for you to seek solace within. Covered your innocent eyes with a heavy drape of lies after lies. They burdened you and as small glimpses of hope began to shine through as your suspicions rose and boiled anticipating me to justify your quest for the truth buried deep inside of me. but no mistake slipped through the source's hands, never enough mistakes for you to detect the slightest suspicions of a dying husband wailing a last frail cry of what hope was left.  
  
And so he won, like a miner struck gold, he rejoiced and it empowered him, he finally won the battle. I gazed with despairing stares through the narrow corroded cage of my body as the source toyed with my emotions. He closed his fist tight around every last fraction of my feelings and suffocated each of them and he strangled me. His hard bony fingers dug into my throat as he easily smothered me.  
  
When I heard the question escape through the slim doorways of my soul, you asked me. you asked me on the bed if there was anything I wasn't telling you. How I wanted to yell out and scream out the unmistakable answer. I gathered my only remaining, disappearing scrap of strength and I tried, I tried to let the sound rip out of a body I no longer had struggling possession of.  
  
I tried to urge and seduce the sound to trickle out of my dry cracking soul. The scars so deep they carved intricate patterns, and I tried to tempt the words to flow through these cracks of the dry valley. But the words never came. and like a perfect sculptor, the source shaped and crafted a single word, which detonated my fading essence into a million pieces as that word mocked me with an enticing whisper.  
  
" ...... no...."  
  
  
  
You never meant to wrench the gift of life away from me, I know. I know now, in the last slither of my soul, that you never meant to tug so violently on the precious, vital gift like a spoilt child. You would never intentionally take my last hopes, my fading dreams for us away from me. They drift away in the nameless sea, empty dreams and blank fantasies fill the void we both had been dreading in the tiny crevasse of our souls for so long.  
  
Like a mother's warm embrace deserting a child, our hopes hung in the air, fragile and delicate. But at last the narrow, twisted road of our fate lead us to our inevitable ending. I keep repeating the words in the crumbly, weakening remains of my soul; they swim around my last puddle of thoughts. But they'll slow down. soon.  
  
I reach out with my thrashing arms, flailing them wildly as my inner desperation reaches its climax. I long to breath, to feel the refreshing cool soothe of the sparkling air within my lungs. Am I sinking into such a dark, sinister pool of denial? Or did you really intend to stab those words so deeply into my already wounded soul. as expertly as an experienced torturer, you grinded my wounds deeper until fresh blood gushed freely. Only then did the torture seem to end.  
  
My final recall in the brittle imprisonment of my mind was that when at last, at long last, the source released me and like a pathetic prisoner, shut out from the radiant sunlight for too long, I waited in sweet anticipation. Too blind from the sickening, glutinous web of our lost love, my hope soar forward on angel's wings when at last I saw you through my own eyes.  
  
But the intoxicating perfume of smoke pervaded my nostrils and I knew. I knew why the source has discarded my body like a meaningless crinkled piece of rubbish into the soiled gutter. I knew you had slaughtered me and like a lion prowling its prey, you had hunted me down and at long last you had reached your long-overdue target and won your prize of my life.  
  
Yet, has the knowledge, that I had no scrap of memory, not even a glimpse left in my mind, come to you? Or has that knowledge drifted past you, unnoticed and invisible through the glazy layer of tears?  
  
I possess no understanding of what vile and tormenting games the source had forced you to play, but the real question, I long to hear the bitter answer to is why?  
  
To what extent did the Source prolong his heartless games to drive you to be the slayer of my death? 


	3. Part Two: I stand alone

Phoebe  
  
And so. my quest had begun but little did I know that there would never be an end, and I would hunt for my love forever. My mission draped a curtain over my eyes and I was blinded by my path of desperation and slowly. I came to the unavoidable conclusion that I was on my own on this infinite journey.  
  
Part Two: I stand alone  
  
Funny how time seems to blur by, as if I am a traveller on a never ending marry-go-round. I ride on the bleak and lifeless wooden horses as they thrust their frozen hoofs forward on an empty track. My eyes absorb the scene around me as visions meld into one big blur of pointless colours. An artist lost of inspiration; I stare with every tick of the clock at my blinded visions, full of hopelessness.  
  
Voices sometimes drift in and out but I still pretend not to hear them. Like waves licking gently at the beach they wash over me but never inside of me. As if I am in an endless trance, I just feel myself nod .. But I barely feel myself, just a glimpse but then the cold iron door of bitter denial slams in my face and I submerge into my world of blurred visions again. The faces appear once in a while, randomly they haunt me and interlace their icy thoughts into mine. I sense their desperations mounting as they anxiously try to interact with me. to find that key into my heart and mind, to claim the lost sister they once had in an unmentionable time.  
  
But I can't go back, not now and not ever. His scarlet blood stains my guilty hands day after day, his death playing like an old film broken down. It plays over and over again, always repeating the same looks; the same tears and the same bullets of pain shoot at me again and again. But no one will repair that broken film and I feel my heart captured as I fly off into a lost and broken world of my own, a world that I never asked to be in. How can I rectify the pain I have caused him? How can I undo all the scars he had slit so deeply within me?  
  
Infinite questions centres my mind and my defeated heart, like a tornado it whirls around me over and over again. How I long to be set free from these endless questions, they're like prison guards, their grips icy cold, their eyes lifeless yet menacing in a nameless way. Coldheartedly, they hold me back from being set free of my own hell. People whom I once called my sisters no longer exist, like a trembling leaf, its branches cracking as it anticipates the grand launch of its journey, all memory of the past is carried off with the strong gale. The gusty wind dances my every memory like a thin ribbon of leaves as it prances lightly in the magical air.  
  
I'm going to get Cole back. the words echo through the colossal empty quarters of my mind. A faint recall of the words propels dark shivers through my every vein, as the words groped out of the dark restricts of my throat, it floated out as lightly as a feather. The two people stared deeply into my weary but determined eyes, their narrowed doubtful ones reflected sharply into my own. I blinked to frantically break the eerie exchange of secret looks between them. Like a silent unbreakable code, they communicated through every concerned glance. I watched like a spectator, my hopes dissolved as quickly as it had surged in the unexplored recesses of my heart. I almost anticipated their every sympathetic, hesitant word. Their over-due light, sickening sisterly touches on my arm.  
  
I could feel their doubts and suspicions, their last hopes dieing of a love-blinded widow shadowed by stubbornness. I didn't need their sceptical comfort; I didn't need their mocking reassurances that my path of destiny will suddenly detour from a treacherous alleyway into a bright and sunny road. Their tender touches and soft words hit me hard, suffocated me with every gasping breathe. Their hopeless comforts too viscously sickening to seek solace within, I am alone on my quest to save my love, their doubtful glances a long-expected confirmation of their lost support, I stand solitude in a wasteland of shattered dreams, and I continue on alone on my journey of hell to rectify the murder of my love.  
  
Day after day, the rough familiar leather presses against my trembling hands, as my fingers gingerly lift the pages. My skin barely touching the rusty yellow aged paper, afraid to reach out to false hope. All my life, it has haunted me, coursed through my every vein. I watch silently as the once familiar faces observe me like a specimen within a glass case. They try but they can't shatter the unbreakable boundary of glass around me.  
  
They watch me sympathetically; words flow out of their mouths as effortlessly as a river of water meandering through the bottomless valleys. Every word carried with it a heavy negative sound. telling me to give up, the harmony of their low and soft voices carving a song out of pain. A song I try to block out but with every failed spell, I hear it more and more clearly and the luminous sunlight of hope is slowly shadowed by their despair.  
  
But I can no longer ignore the distraught cries of him. I feel his every yearning to touch me, just to see me. His eyes strain day after day and somehow, in the unspoken pit of my beaten heart, I know he's out there somewhere, be it a inexpressible void or a corroded wasteland of lost and broken hopes, I can feel his every scream as he defies the lethargic seduction of death. His strength deteriorating with every cry. Deprived of a body, a mind. what choice is there but to hang onto our abandoned passion?  
  
I stand forlorn in my own failures, yet I still cling vigorously onto my last tatter of dreams and the last ray of hope still burns through.  
  
TBC.. 


End file.
